How does the "No Intimate Relationships During the First Year of Recovery" Apply to Couples?
You are speaking to what may be the number one challenge couples in early recovery face: Exercising healthy self-care and self-interest in a relationship when you don't know how, never did before, and have no role models. After sustained stabilization, the next stage of early recovery is intensive self-care, however long it takes to develop the relationship with oneself. The challenge heats up when you're just realizing a relationship you're in isn't working when you're just learning what having a relationship with yourself means and just learning how to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy relationships. The latter part of this period of intensive self-care involves getting through what we may aptly refer to as the 'co-dependent crash' -- when the illusion you've been hanging onto for dear life shatters. After intensive self-care is a stage of relationship training.
We're talking about a process of re-prioritization -- putting yourself firs t -- breaking out of the deeply ingrained pattern of considering others before oneself and relying on others who provide little or no emotional support rather tapping the infinite resource we call your self. Intensive self-care readies you for the next stage of recovery where the focus in on your relationships because you'll being entering into any relationship situation able to define and represent yourself. What distinguishes healthy from unhealthy relationships is whether both people are operating from within themselves, not depending on each another to provide what's been missing.
How do you balance between your recovery and the relationship?
If both of you love each other and want to rebuild the relationship, ongoing individual therapy for both of you, probably for several months, then accompanied by on-going couples therapy, preferably with an addiction/relationship specialist is recommended.
Posted by Daniel Linder, MFT
How does the "No Intimate Relationships During the First Year of Recovery" Apply to Couples?
You are speaking to what may be the number one challenge couples in early recovery face: Exercising healthy self-care and self-interest in a relationship when you don't know how, never did before, and have no role models. After sustained stabilization, the next stage of early recovery is intensive self-care, however long it takes to develop the relationship with oneself. The challenge heats up when you're just realizing a relationship you're in isn't working when you're just learning what having a relationship with yourself means and just learning how to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy relationships. The latter part of this period of intensive self-care involves getting through what we may aptly refer to as the 'co-dependent crash' -- when the illusion you've been hanging onto for dear life shatters. After intensive self-care is a stage of relationship training.
We're talking about a process of re-prioritization -- putting yourself firs t -- breaking out of the deeply ingrained pattern of considering others before oneself and relying on others who provide little or no emotional support rather tapping the infinite resource we call your self. Intensive self-care readies you for the next stage of recovery where the focus in on your relationships because you'll being entering into any relationship situation able to define and represent yourself. What distinguishes healthy from unhealthy relationships is whether both people are operating from within themselves, not depending on each another to provide what's been missing.
How do you balance between your recovery and the relationship?
If both of you love each other and want to rebuild the relationship, ongoing individual therapy for both of you, probably for several months, then accompanied by on-going couples therapy, preferably with an addiction/relationship specialist is recommended.